Does for-profit edtech serve the students that need it most?
Venture capitalists have poured $2.3 billion into education technology startups since 2010.
But most of the companies focus on already advantaged students.
Shannon Farley of Fast Forward takes edtech investors to task for neglecting low-resource students. “The majority of paid products cannot reach the communities ripe for impact,” and are not designed with low-income kids or poor-infrastructure schools in mind, Farley writes.
Nonprofits, such as LitLab, which offers a free digital reading library, may be better suited to do that. Last year, for-profit Duck Duck Moose was absorbed by the nonprofit Khan Academy — which made the company’s previously paid mobile games available for free.
